A taste of what’s to come in the Queensland election campaign has been airing on the telly over the last few nights. One of the advantages for Labor of the early election speculation is that almost anything they do that’s actually campaign-ish gets reported as news. So the Labor attack ad directed at Lawrence Springborg drowned out his economic policy speech yesterday. That may not be a bad thing, as the only initiative he came up with is, well, dumb, as Sam Clifford points out, so it actually serves to reinforce the negative message from the ALP. That’s (among other things) to suggest that Lawrence just can’t cut it. The timing of the attack and its substance appear to have achieved their objectives – not firing the starting gun for an early campaign, but shaping the coverage and perception of The Borg’s economic policy announcement.
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Thanks for the link, Mark. That ad by the ALP is quite effective as it shows that Springborg not only has no economic credibility but suggests that he is a bumbling fool who is going to screw up everything he can get his hands on. The LNP could do worse than Springborg but they could do much better. Portraying him as a leader who minces his words is going to remind people of Joh and “You can’t burn your cake at both ends”.
Sam, yep, that’s what they’re up to, I think. Showing up Springborg’s manner of speaking to remind people of Joh. I imagine there’ll be an ad in the works intercutting the two.
Doesn’t help his cause, of course, that the Borg is thick as the proverbial…
He’s as thick as an apple a day.
Sam:
“The LNP could do worse than Springborg”
Have to agree with that. It’s a long list. But:
“they could do much better.”
Not sure about that, given the leader would have to be a Nat.
Who would be your choice?
Sam, (per link): “If you fire all your staff now and don’t hire anyone new, you’ll be eligible for a tax rebate at the end of the financial year.”
I’m not entirely convinced that many $1million+ payrolling businesses ( less than that there’s no tax) will think “I’ll fire all my staff now, and not hire anyone new” (ie become a sole trader or rely on unpaid family members or something to do stuff), would be all that an effective way to keep a several $million businesss going, all for the sake of a tax rebate of maybe tens of thousands. I’d be surprised if there was a business at all to tax in the first place with that sort of thinking. I also don’t follow how you and mark derive that counterintuitive strategy from “If you maintain your staffing levels at current levels throughout a financial year…”, but I failed Machiavelli 101, I’d be grateful if you could show your working. I just don’t get it.
Also, per your “The LNP could do much better (than Sprinborg)” opinion : such as? Anyone the Greens could work with, to get a better ecoresult than they have out of Beattie/Bligh/LudwigLedLabor? Related to that, what’s the Greens line on the LNP/ David Gibson policy of reversing
?
I suppose you know, but Ronan will be speaking on Carbon Footprintery tomorrow night at the Paddo Worker’s Club. (Thanks George Georges and Hughie Williams: imagine, once upon a time , we had MP’s prepared to get arrested for protesting about something they believed in. Hmmm Bob and Christine maybe.) Earlier in the evening he’ll be at an uber-luvvie meeting in Taringa: he really will have to do a bit of cycle racing across the hills of the western suburbs to be at both and keep his footprint mini.
Someone who is not yet in parliament. I have no doubt that the LNP will make gains in this election, Bligh is on the nose and had 2/3 of the seats. The challenge for the LNP is to put young, intelligent, eloquent candidates in marginal seats who are able to convince the local voters that they’re not just the lackeys of the front bench contenders (Springborg, McArdle, Nicholls, etc.)
“two short planks saves nine” – new LNP recession prevention policy
The Borg and the choppers.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25035384-29277,00.html
Mission impossible, I reckon, Sam.
“Mission impossible, I reckon, Sam.”
Oh, I don’t know about that…. Our LNP candidate seems to fit the bill…
“… keeps birds as a hobby and has a history of involvement in the unusual sport of Pigeon Racing, working in various honorary positions in the sport in Ipswich and the Queensland Racing Pigeon Federation over many years.”
How’s that for a resume highlight?
Steve are you saying that the Borg is claiming that he is being shadowed by the Black Choppers? Is doesn’t surprise me in the least.
((yes, srsly, i read the article about clive palmer’s helicopter rides. borg can haz copter rides? wheeee!!!)).
Danny, the Greens support a gross solar feed-in tariff to really get the ball rolling and recently announced a plan for the construction of two large solar thermal power stations in Queensland. Then there’s the stuff about energy efficiency as well. http://qld.greens.org.au/media-releases/greens-launch-green-collar-jobs-package-for-queensland
I don’t mind if Lawrence steals Greens policy if they somehow win the next election.
As for someone the Greens could work with? It’d have to be someone pretty special and Mark seems to think it’s impossible. The LNP are still very much dominated by the Nationals and their rural supporters so it would have to be a special kind of leader who could lead the state to re-examine its agricultural practices and stop the resumption of pastoral land for mines.
In response to your questioning my questioning of Springborg’s policy, one could lay off a few staff now to save money in the GFC/recession and then maintain staff numbers at the lower level to qualify for the payroll tax bonus. I think the idea of payroll tax relief for employing 2-6 new employees will do a better job of encouraging business to take on more staff.
Sam, one of the problems the Greens have in Queensland is that the “centre” of gravity is fairly far to the right. Labor don’t have to be all that much to the left of the Nats to look like the epitome of moderation.
I’m sure The Federal Leader of the Opposition would be amused to find this gem in the Liberal National Party economic platform too,
“Spending priorities will be reordered to address emerging economic circumstances, but a strategic response to mitigate the economic impact of the global financial crisis would be expected to involve increasing public debt.”
Not very consistent with the wailing and gnashing of teeth along with crocodile tears going on in the Senate this afternoon.
And another thing, what a sad heap of claptrap the Liberal National Party economic platform turned out to be. Supposedly a major economic statement with minimal detail and a solitary dodgy graph in the last couple of pages. Probably the most outstandingly insane misuse of a graph for a long time. It might with any luck sink like Knowledge Nation but this time because of simplistic inadequacy rather than KN’s complexity
Taa Sam, in the meantime I found:
Mr Lee said he welcomed advances in environment policy by the LNP: “The Greens, like the LNP, support a Gross Feed-In Tariff but we also want to go much further. Dave Gibson needs to be careful he doesn’t get too far ahead of his party on energy policy and forget that the LNP is backed by some of the most powerful mining interests in the country, including Clive Palmer.”
Why he needs to be careful i don’t know, it’s not like the LNP can discipline or disindorse him. He’s wildly popular, a hero even, in his electorate,labor has no chance there (it’s their lowest polling seat, 12.36%). After the Mary River Dam victory, he could stand as an independent, a calathumpian, or the Greens for htat matter, in Gympie and win. After all, he only answered a “Wanted: Nats Candidate for Gympie” ad in the paper, it’s not like he’s rusted on to the LNP. Yep, he’s the “Better than Borg” solution. Someone in the party thinks so too: “He ran an extremely professional campaign which saw him easily defeat popular sitting Independent Elisa Roberts. David’s parliamentary performance in his first term has been very impressive and he has been spoken about as a future leader,” a party executive who asked not to be named told a popular online rural newspaper.
BTW, that bit about “a special kind of leader who could .. stop the resumption of pastoral land for mines.” David Gibson is on record here on LP with “My personal view is that we should protect good productive agricultural land from being lost to either coal mines or irrational dams”. It’s a start. As for your take that Mark’s opinion is that it’s impossible to find a Pineapple the Greens could work with: I’m not sure that’s what he said was impossible, but as to whatever it was, I’ve got
threetwo words: Mandy Rice-Davies.Steve,
I was so horrified over that gruesome abuse of Excel that I was going to write a post about it – but instead went into a kind of shock, from which I have still yet to fully recover.
For those not acquainted with this little number, it was a bar graph with 3 pseudo dimensions, on a grey default background, where the data the bars supposedly represented couldn’t be read – and I have the distinct feeling that it was supposed to look whatever it is that the LNP calls “hip” these days.
The other mystery to me is I watched about 3 minutes of Parliament and there was McArdle ranting about $65 Billion of Labor debt. I have never been able to understand where the Liberal National Party get this figure from, who made it up and just what repeating this mysterious figure repeatedly achieves apart from annoying anyone subjected to this behaviour.
This is part of what Deputy Liberal National Party leader had to say in hansard yesterday. I don’t know what he means as there is no way of translating the ramblings of the Queensland National party into simple easily understood English.
[This is a government that is simply bereft of ideas as to how to stimulate the economy. Despite the fact that it uses rhetoric, it does not walk the talk. The government simply does not comprehend that it needs to work hand in hand with private enterprise to ensure that private enterprise also takes control of such ventures, because it is private enterprise which knows how to turn a dollar, which knows how to stimulate the economy and which will make this state great into the future. Small businesses are the backbone of this state. This government simply does not comprehend that when it puts its toe into the water it pollutes the water; it does not assist it.]
Steve: Much as I’d hate it to be thought I was defending LaborInc’s “efforts”, in fairness: perhaps part of the reason these Tories are so incoherent is they are being fundamantally dishonest, determinedly holding to a flawed idealogy, as all idealogies are. And they know it, and that sets up a neurological state of “Cognitive dissonance”, and confused thinking results. This simplistic “small business/private enterprise which knows how to turn a dollar, which knows how to stimulate the economy” fetish ignores rule # 1 in small business: the customer pays my bills, and affords me my living.
I wonder about this so-called sb/pe ( cf the evil gov’t/public ) sector, how much of it is propped up by gov’t/taxpayer spending as the customer par excellence. Far from “when it puts its toe into the water it pollutes the water”, maybe the government is providing life support to sb/pe’s ? I dunno where such a figure could be found ( how much the govt shells out to the sb/pe sector, mind you these days it would be a fair whack of the budget, it’s not like we have eg a dept of works that actually builds stuff in house) but I have had a look at Tenders Queensland, closed and archived tenders . The govt gives a plasterer nearly 200thou to “Supply and install fire rated ceilings and partitions” at a Labrador Motel; a Mr Bell is given 130 thou to “Supply and install of concrete paving and concrete block retaining walls” at a block of (presumably gov’t) flats in Manly; 800 thou to a consultancy for “Provision of Needs Assessment and Prioritisation Methodologies for Disability Services Queensland” ( which you might have thought would be better done in house, to capture the process knowledge). Etc.
My point is not for what, how much, or who to, the gov’t shells out, but that it actually is supporting sb/pe big time, and it’s dishonest of these tories to suggest otherwise. If anyone can figure out a smart way to total these tenders, I’d love to see a figure for sb/pe sector’s remit from the taxpayer. Either it’s a conscious lie these Troglodyte Tories are retailing, or they really are too stupid to know how the system “works”.
danny @ 17 – but the Borg isn’t leader by accident. There’s a conservative clique with their head in the sands running the LNP (along with the Santoro faction of the ex-Libs). It’s not as though the leader is picked on merit! That’s not how power works in political parties.
If the Borg crashes and burns, the Seeney mob will be wanting another go, for a start.
Danny, do you think Gibson will ever lead the LNP if he exists so far out of the core? At best he would be a high profile Minister, surely. I’m not trying to slight him, he sounds like he’s got a good head on his shoulders.
Kim: (Rear-Admiral) Borg crashes and burns (the ship of altered statesmen) , the Seeney/Santorians sewer rats are coming up the S-bend out of the holding-tank of the collective tory party wisdom head …
… at which horrific point the drugged and press-ganged Signaller David Gibson wakes from his delerious nightmare with a start. He sees the pumps of the bilge of party coffers are clogged with some foul coal-economy exudate, they aren’t going to last much longer, the sails which are permanantly set for a fair-weather consumer economy have been shredded by the pustule covered crew to make their essential-services-policies-provision bandages. There’s a greenish lifeboat drifting off toward the horizon. He looks at the crew gone mad with drinking salt-water from the backwards-plumbed desal unit, and fighting over whose turn it is on the rudderless wheel, and he thinks ” Stuff this for a joke, either they let me set up a jury rig and set a course for out of here, or I’m jumping ship and taking my chances in yon green lifeboat. Nah, I’m for the lifeboat. Bye losers”
He finds a stowaway from another ship already in the lifeboat, name of Lee. Daring Dave says “Look mate, like it or not, we’re in this together, I’m way better provisioned than you with comfortable majority cookies, you’re looking pretty thin around the labor preferences waistline, you might not last the electoral night. Let’s put our ex-hometeam differences aside until we’re in some port, where we can sell our story for a motza, and for now get this solar-powered steam engine thingy going”. Stowaway Lee thinks half a second it’s the best offer I’m likely to get, and says “Fair enough, but when we get into port, can we say it was my idea? And if you promise to not sing Stand By Your Damsite, I wont do any MaryRiverDancing.” Just then Purser Clive from the slowly sinking scow, LNP, reaches in over the gunnels and says, “Let me and my son in, we’ve knocked off all the vanity mirrors from the cabinet cabins, and got them on this ethical investment hedge-fund raft we can trail behind us and focus them all on the solar boiler and really get a head of Green Economy Steam up, and get out of here quick-smart before we get sucked into the vortex as the two ships of the Major Parties finally go down. You need my cashed-up mirrors and I need your Green brand-name boiler, have we got a deal?. And I want the film rights”
Stay tuned for the next unbelievable tale from the crazy world that is Queensland politics.
Danny, hasn’t the problem with Gympie always been that young people are its biggest export because of the unemployment being greater than most other areas in the state?
Has there been any improvement since David Gibson moved from Editor of the Gympie Times to Member for Gympie?
I actually misread the title, and thought that this story was about a Borgasm.
*shudder*
Steve: No idea, but if it were otherwise, ie an electorate simply adjusting it’s member being a sufficient condition for turning around youth unemployment, we’d have heard about it, they’d all want one. Is it different to other inland towns (who don’t happen to have a mine handy) in that regard? If it was such a big local electoral deal, I’d imagine the Beattie line Traveston = yoof employment opportunity would have been more successful, yet “No Damn Dam” seems to have been the turnkey issue that Gibson rode in on. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gympie became TreeChanger capital of the universe, outside Tasmania. If that was a significant demographic event, with legs, then Green Tory would be a pretty canny pitch: forget yoof, it’s those aging young at heart with many years of good voting left in ‘em what matter.
Are you obliquely suggesting there was a significant “Rosebud” factor at work? How many pollies get to polish house leather on the strength of their mass market recognition from a previous media industry career, which maybe a small town paper editor qualifies as? Apart from Ms. Max of course. And Pete. And the original and best, Pick-a-Box Baz. And David Jull. And the late great Les Haylen, who apparently is responsible for the phrase exquisitely expressing the politicians’ lament : “(having to attend yet another) fete worse than death”, and who also claimed the ultimate title for political memoir ” 20 years Hard Labor” ( That’s how long he held his Parkes seat, until a young JWH drew his first campaign blood in 1963)
Sam: You don’t think it’s a bit premature to be having leadership speculation about a party that lost an election before the election has been called? No, neither do I. Who’s the leader of the Queensland Greens again? Gibson: Could he ever lead the LNP? Would he want to? Imagine what you’d have to step through to get there. What Kim was saying about merit having little to do with it, otherwise Fiona Simpson, (class of 92, like Gibson ex- rural papers ), with Sunshine Coast almost metropolitan, you’d think she’d have picked up a non-hayseed idea or two in that time. If it came to her and Anna head to head it could get nasty, if this exchange I heard one morning is anything to go by:
Of course, that “personally appointed, non-advertised position of Director of the Office of Climate Change” is Anna’s husband. Happy Pills? It’s a bit like McNamara having a go at Gibson about having Tourette’s: about as low as you can go. A Gibson/Simpson Nat ticket could be interesting. Forget the libs, let the greens pick up metropolitan seats to set up a new sort of coalition. The Nats shouldn’t find it hard to understand Retailing Green as the new black for their beloved small business paradigm.
The Australian Financial review (page 7) has an article by Mark Ludlow that explains where the $65 Billion debt source comes from.
” The Labor government predicted in its mid-year economic review in December it would borrow an extra $32.2 billion over the next four years, including $15.1 billion in the general government sector and $17.1 billion for government owned corporations, to take total government debt to $65 billion by 2011 – 12.”
Also in the “answering my own question’ section:
“How much of (the small business/ private enterprise sector in queensland) is propped up by gov’t/taxpayer spending as the customer par excellence.?”…
An indicator: “About 40 per cent of Queensland’s civil contractors rely on government work”
Putting those last two observations (28/29) together, what we have is the scenario whereby a certain proportion of that $65 billion government debt, and it’s management and interest bill, will be being incurred for the purpose of keeping a certain number of private contractors, of varying sizes, to varying extents, profitable. Their social contract is basically to provide ( highly unionized sectors?) jobs, that’s the special pleading case driving Lucas’ fast-tracking projects, above link. How much of the taxpayer provided cashflow above and beyond that, and business reinvestment, ends up as contractor profit share, for their speculations, trinkets, parties and playgrounds, describes the post-agrarian, now contractor, socialist paradise of crane-addled qld.
My favourite Qld contractor after-the-deal taxpayer gouge is the more than doubling of the estimate over 12 months, for the South Brisbane Electorate Childrens hospital before a sod was even turned. And they keep getting away with it. BTW, What’s the first thing they are building? Hint: it’s in Brisbane. Yep, a tunnel.
So, if the central plank of the Borgist creed is that the Beattie/Bligh regime doesn’t know how to, or just doesn’t, look after private enetrprise’ interests, there’s gonna be less people in that church than @ St Mary’s when the <a href=Bishop’s administrator is frocked up and dispensing wafers.